Professional Documents
Culture Documents
"National Problem"
Author(s): Mark Thurner
Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review , Aug., 1997, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Aug.,
1997), pp. 409-441
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Hispanic American Historical Review
MARK THURNER
An earlier, Spanish-language version of this paper was presented to the colloquium "Econo-
mia, Politica, y Cultura de los Pueblos Indigenas en America Latina, Siglo XIX," sponsored
by FLACSO and INAH (Mexico) in Quito, Ecuador, June 1995. The comments and criticism
of friends and colleagues at that reunion, and of the anonymous readers for HAHR, have
undoubtedly improved this paper. Support of archival research in Peru in 1989-go and 1995-
96, provided by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned
Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program of the U.S. Department of
Education, and the University of Florida, is gratefully acknowledged.
Archives consulted in the research include the Archivo Departamental de Ancash, Huaraz
(ADA); Archivo General de la Naci6n, Lima (AGN); Archivo Hist6rico Militar del Peru, Lima
(AHM); and Biblioteca Nacional del Peru/Sala de Investigaciones, Lima (BNP/SJ).
The indigena don Pedro Atusparia, alcalde ordinario and Chief of numer-
ous Indians, who after defeating the [pro-Iglesias] forces commanded by
Coronel Noriega, implanted constitutional order in the Department of
Ancash, paid a visit to General Caceres today....
[Atusparia] . . . said that when the General passed on his way to
Huamachuco the authorities had not taken care to make [the Indians]
comprehend what the international war [with Chile] was about, and that
if they had known they would have mobilized thousands of lancemen in
a single day.
He also spoke of the poll tax and asked that it be reduced. And last
[Atusparia] lamented the shootings and assassinations committed against
his race....
During the whole conversation they spoke only in Quechua, both
the General and Atusparia.3
A second version, longer than the first, is also noteworthy for the following
passages:
4. El Comercio, june 2, 1886. Both these newspaper reports are reproduced in William W
Stein, El levantainiento de Atusparia: el movimiento poptular ancashino de 1885, un estutdio de
documentos (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1988), 272-76. Translationis are mine.
Atusparia ... said that he was sent by all the citizens of the indige-
nous race that forni the communities of Huaraz, personally to convince
himself that General Caceres, EL GRAN REPUBLICANO, as they call
him, would finally assume supreme power. [Atusparia had heard] that
[Caceres] had been forced to consent to a betrayal by a part of the cur-
rent Government that would have put power in the hands of Iglesistas,
against whom they had fought very hard.
It was not, after all, surprising that the medium of exchange between the
veteran soldier from Ayacucho and the inquiring varayoc (staffholder, vil-
lage headman) of Huaraz should be some lingua franca manner of mediated
Quechua speech, despite the marked differences between regional dialect
forms. Caceres, who descended from the landed creole elite of colonial
Huamanga, found it natural to appeal to his Indian compatriots (and peons)
5. Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: Oni the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994).
6. The -mni suffix in the Quechua language, or Rutna Simi (in Atusparia's dialect, Nuna
Shnim) indicates that the speaker has eyewitness validation of an event.
7. Nelson Manrique, Campesinado y naci6n: las gtuerrillas indigenas en la guerra con Chile
(Lima: Ital Peru, 1981); Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central
Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1983).
Atusparia and Caceres had nearly crossed paths once before, although the
general was then in rather a hurry. Atusparia may even have had a glimpse
of him mounted on his horse, although Caceres would not have noticed
Atusparia. It was only weeks before the decisive Battle of Huamachuco
(July 10, 1883), which marked the strategic end of the national resistance
against Chilean occupation, and only two years before the uprising of March
through May 1885 that now carries Atusparia's name. With superior Chilean
battalions in hot pursuit, General Caceres and his Central Army beat a
desperate zigzag retreat from the main theater of the resistance in Junin,
marching to Huanuco and then across mountainous terrain to Huaraz, where
Caceres had hoped to join forces with Colonel Isaac Recavarren's Northern
Army. But Recavarren's unsuspecting force was then stationed well to the
north of Huaraz, near Atun Huaylas, poised for the march on Iglesias.
We do not know if Atusparia held a local alcalde or varayoc post in
his village of Marian at the time, although it is possible; we do know that
other Indians carried the staff of varayoc leadership in Huaraz. Perhaps they
would have admitted that the statement "the authorities had not taken care
to make [the Indians] comprehend what the international war [with Chile]
was about" was not entirely true. Colonel Recavarren had made such efforts
(albeit with less success than he would have liked) in the months preceding
Caceres' unanticipated arrival. Under Recavarren's loose command, patri-
otic peasant guerrillas and montoneras were organized in the northwestern
parts of highland Ancash; but these units were recruited in, and operated in,
the northern Cordillera Negra region, far removed from Huaraz, as it was
there that Recavarren, following strict orders from Caceres, most needed
defensive units to ward off Chilean incursions and to prepare the way for his
planned march on General Iglesias in Cajamarca.
That march was suddenly curtailed as the theater of conflict quickly
shifted to the central valley of Ancash, the Callejon de Huaylas, between
Huaraz and Yungay. The Chilean invasion came swiftly on the heels of Ca'-
ceres' retreating Central Army. Local members of the Cacerista elite who
remained in Huaraz (most were with Recavarren) were left largely defense-
less, having failed to mobilize the peasantry. They would now welcome
Caceres' force, which rapidly passed through town on its way north to meet
Recavarren. At the same time, however, Iglesista elements quickly emerged
in Huaraz to embrace openly the superior Chilean force chasing Caceres.
[Atusparial also spoke of the poll tax and asked that it be reduced.
Apparently Atusparia had made this same request, albeit in the form of an
urgent petition to the prefecture, once before. Perhaps he now recounted
that previous instance to the general; it was in late February 1885 when the
moneyless Prefecture of Ancash, then under the command of the Iglesista
colonel Francisco Noriega, posted broadsides around town announcing that
all "contributors" (most of whom were Indian peasants, peons, and share-
croppers) must immediately pay two semesters of the poll tax (the semester
rate was one Peruvian sol).
It was the district governors' duty to order the subordinate Indian
alcaldes ordinarios to update the required mnatriculas, or tax registers, of
their respective jurisdictions. The Blue governor of the "first district" of
Huaraz, La Independencia, at the time was Jose Collazos, leader of a coup
on October 9, 1884, that had restored the Iglesistas to power in Ancash. Atus-
paria was the alcalde ordinario of this first and most extensive district of the
10. Jesus Elfas to Isaac Recavarren, Chilia, July 29, 1883, AHM, Archivo Recavarren,
cuaderno lo, fols. 40-43v.
11. Contemporary historiography on the uprising repeats Ernesto Reyna's initial error,
which misidentified Atusparia as the alcalde peddnieo of La Restauraci6n District. On the dual
colonial-Andean organization of districts in Huaraz, see Mark Thurner, From Two Republics
to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Natioinnakinig in Anidean Peru (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 1997), chap. 3 and p. 169, n. 4.
12. Contrary to the historiography, which claims that Atusparia signed with an X, Huaraz'
notarial records demonstrate that Atusparia learned to sign his name, albeit shakily, sometime
between 1879 and 1886. He was otherwise illiterate and unschooled. His signature appears in
ADA, Fondo Notarial Valerio, Civiles, legajo 48, Libro de Juicios verbales, fol. lv, Feb. 4, 1886.
13. Although this petition has not been preserved, rough descriptions of it are given in
the June 22, 1885, edition of El Comnercio. On the basis of these, the petition would closely
resemble surviving petitions presented by the alcaldes of Huaraz in 1887.
14. El Cornercio, Apr. 9, 1885.
15. Reports range from four hundred to two thousand Indians at this protest. The lower
figure appears more likely.
i6. El Comercio, Apr. 29, 1885.
17. Ibid., May 2, 1885.
18. On Cochachin as alcalde peddneo, see oral account in Stein, El levantaoiiento, 245-48.
tion, political or military, in March 1885. The Indian hamlets of Rupas were
apparently mobilized by their alcalde pedaneo, Juan Cebrino.'9
Farther downriver, the locus of mobilization was (Uma) Mancos, a small
village (and hacienda) just to the south of Yungay. Yungay was then the
second-largest town (after Huaraz) in the fertile Callejon de Huaylas. Still
farther down the valley, related revolts were staged in (Atun) Huaylas and
Macate.20 In late March, the concentration of peasants in Mancos, initially
led by Simon Bambaren, prepared to attack Yungay and its urban guard.
Like the scene in Huaraz at dawn on March 3, the hills around Yungay now
were crowned with haranguing peasants from all the surrounding hamlets.
This massive mobilization in Mancos caused Blue elites huddled in Yun-
gay to sound the first alarms of an ominous "race war."'" Fearing for their
lives and possessions, Yungay's "families" fled downriver to the nearby town
of Caraz.
On Palm Sunday, 1885, the assault on Yungay began. The first attack
faltered, and Bambaren was killed in action. At this point, the recently
appointed Cacerista prefect, Manuel Mosquera, a lawyer and former rep-
resentative to the National Congress held in Arequipa in 1883, set out from
Huaraz-apparently with Atusparia and Guillen, among others-to take
command of the siege. Prefect Mosquera and the Indian leaders, like every-
one else present, was well aware that Yungay's notables had publicly declared
allegiance to the government of Miguel Iglesias.22 On Holy Saturday, Mos-
quera, accompanied by Indian guerrilleros from the many hamlets of Huaraz
and Carhuaz, stormed Yungay with four thousand to eight thousand com-
batants. By now poorly munitioned, the urban guard of Yungay was driven
out of its positions. Many were killed as they scrambled downriver in the
direction of Caraz, including the despised guard commander, Manuel Rosas
Villon. The victors proceeded to burn or confiscate the booty of war, which
consisted mainly of the property and possessions of guard members and the
more prominent, pro-Iglesias Blue notables of Yungay.23
Before taking Yungay a sangre yfuego, Prefect Mosquera had addressed
an ultimatum to Commander Villon and "the notables of Yungay." Mosquera
had demanded "an Act signed by all the notables of Yungay recognizing
the Government of General Caceres"; also "40 rifles that have been offered
and loo more equipped with the respective ammunition" and "five thousand
24. Iraola to War Ministry, Yungay, Apr. 29, 1885, AHM, Prefecturas Ancash.
25. El Comercio, Apr. 9, 1885.
26. See ibid., Apr. 29, 1885.
27. El Campe6on (Lima), May 12, 1885.
28. Expediente relativo al incendio del archivo de la Caja Fiscal del Departamento de
Ancash, 1885-86, AGN, O.L. 561-416. In addition to the prefectural archives, it appears that
some private archives, stored in the sacked homes of suspected Iglesistas, were also lost.
29. See Expediente de inventario de las existencias de la Caja Fiscal del Departamento
de Ancash, June 22, 1881, ADA, Fondo Notarial Valerio, leg 45.
30. Wilfredo Kapsoli, ed., Los moviinientos campesinos en1 el Peri, 1879-1965 (Lima:
Delva, 1977). Kapsoli's "antifiscal" notion has also found its way into Stein's Levantamien.to, 73.
31. See Thurner, From Tto Republics, 85-92.
32. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Selected Subaltero Studies, ed.
Guha anid Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 45-87; and Guha,
Elemnentary A.spects of Peasant Inisurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).
33. On taxation and enclosure, see Thurner, "'Repuiblicanos' and 'la Comnunidad'" and
From Two Republics.
by reactionary, "anticom
pounded economic pressure or the political repugnance of the tax but the
violent repression of alcalde mediation and negotiation that appears most
directly linked to the mass mobilization of 1885.
34. Prefect jos6 Iraola to Ministry of Government, Limia, Apr. 8, 1885, BNP/SI, Prefectu-
ras, Ancash, 1885 (1).
35. Iraola to \Var Ministry, Puerto de Casma, Apr. 13, 1885, AHM, Prefecturas, Ancash.
36. A point missed by the historiography. See Mariano Jose Maduefino to Ministry of War,
Lima, Apr. 4, 1885, AGN, O.L. 560-13.
37. Callirgos Quiroga was later sentenced to prison as the responsible commanding officer
in Huamachuco when Puga was assassinated. See C. Augusto Alba Herrera, Atulsparia y la
revoluci6n, campesina de 1885 en Ancash (Lima: Atusparia, 1985), 203-5.
we began to note that from all the hills surrounding Yungay, as well as at
the bridge leading into town, there descended infinite masses of Indians,
that I calculate in more or less 12,000 hailing from all the provinces of
this Department. The attack was tremendous . . . Indian casualties on
this day were numerous, but on our side we lost only two officers and
30 soldiers.... [W]e took a few prisoners, and they declared that the
Alcaldes Atusparia and Granados had, according to some, been killed,
and according to others, wounded.39
With Prefect Mosquera in only precarious control, the tide had now
turned, and the exemplary killing of "savage hordes" had begun. We can-
not know what would have happened with Puga at the helm, but in the
case of Prefect Mosquera and subsequent Cacerista military officers, such as
Colonel Miguel Armando Zamudio, the answer is fairly clear. Closing ranks
with Iglesista alarmists, the local Cacerista command distanced itself from
the "savage hordes." Mosquera soon appealed to Iraola's patriotic conscience
while absolving himself of personal responsibility in the conflict.
As a Peruvian first, and before your allegiance to Sefior Iglesias ... you
should look after the Pueblo [of Yungay] that has received you with such
hospitality.... I am only responding to the blind tenacity of a group of
bad Peruvians who perpetuate the Rule of [the Chilean admiral Patricio]
Lynch in this disgraced land. . . . [T]he valiant warriors who commit
themselves to such a favorable cause will be responsible for its conse-
quences before the country and before history. You and I will safeguard
the principles of Humanity and Civilization, even if it is over our dead
bodies.40
When Mosquera saw that his "valiant warriors" had suffered heavy losses
in several unsuccessful assaults on Iraola's well-munitioned positions in Yun-
gay, he quickly sought an honorable resolution that might save Iraola, Yungay,
and himself from the ignominy that would befall them if they were held
38. Iraola to War Ministry, Yungay, Apr. 29, 1885, AHM, Prefecturas Ancash.
39. Ibid.
40. Mosquera to Iraola, Mancos, Apr. 27 and 28, 1885, ibid.
41. Mosquera to Iraola, Carhuaz, Apr. 27, 1885; Iraola to Mosquera, Yungay, Apr. 28,
1885, ibid.
42. See Callirgos Quiroga to Estado Mayor del Ejercito, Yungay, Apr. 27, 1885, AHM,
Estado Mayor del Ejercito, leg. 0.1885.6.
43. Sergeant Isidro Salazar to Iraola, Huaraz, May 12, 1885, AHM, Prefecturas Ancash,
leg. 0.1885.1.
44. Among those who cited Carranza approvingly were Sir Clements Markham, Javier
Prado, and Carlos Wiesse.
is a robust being, strong to resist the fatigue of long journeys on foot, and
capable of carrying heavy loads on his back for great distances.... In the
eyes of a doctor he offers a lymphatic temperament, accentuated in his
physical constitution as much as it is in the attributes of his character. His
sad and severe physiognomy, with a certain strange mixture of malicious
distraction, is that of a being who revels in a paralyzed intellect in the
midst of a slow but certain progress. Craneologically, he belongs to those
races in which the anterior lobes still have not reached the plenitude of
their development.45
It is above all else necessary to keep in mind that the Indian of today
is in intellectual capacity the same as [he was] in the age of the [Inca]
Empire. The Conquest, far from communicating a new impulse to the
intelligence of the Indian, actually paralyzed it. The spirit of this race
appears to have suffered a trauma so profound that it left it immobile
at a point in its progressive evolution, and since then it has remained in
complete immutability, such that psychologically the Indian of our day
is in the order of moral types what the mammoth preserved in the snows
of the Siberian Sea is in the order of organic types.46
If at some time the sentiments of hate and revenge torment the soul of
the Indian, he is not capable of giving himself over to the transcendence
of virile fury, in which man finds in himself unknown strengths with
which to challenge humanity and his destiny.... The idea of resistance,
45. Luis Carranza, "Apuntes sobre la raza indigena," El Cornercio, May 29, 1885.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Manrique, Canpesinado y naci6n, 1o5-lo.
49. Prefect Iraola to War Ministry, Huaraz, June 1i, 1885, AHM, Prefecturas Ancash.
50. Newspaper reports ranged from one thousand to three thousand Indian casualties,
although Iraola's official reports admitted far fewer. For the upper estimate see El Comnercio,
June 22, 1885.
The race war [of 1885] . . . a horrible picture splattered with blood and
covered with hundreds of cadavers, and perpetually oscillating in our
memory, [should] give us lessons in prudence, justice, and discretion in
our domestic and social relations with a race that, although noble and
timid by nature, has the astuteness of a serpent and the ferocity of the
savage whenever the limits of order are transgressed.5'
These binary, or bipolar, images of indio manso and indio bravo lived
on in the literary and historiographical memory of the Atusparia insurgency.
The indigenista writer and Huaraz native Ernesto Reyna, whose "novel-
ized chronicle" of the uprising, El amnauta Atusparia, appeared in Jose
Carlos Mariategui's socialist cultural and political review Amauta in 1929-
30, picked up on newspaper accounts and local legend, representing the
personages of Atusparia and Cochachin as bipolar archetypes. In Reyna's
canonical portrayal, Cochachin is the essential indio bravo who threatens
to bring race war down on the heads of exploiting whites: an untamed,
rude, anticlerical "skull crusher" and "drinker of [white] blood." Meanwhile,
Reyna's Atusparia, noble messiah of the Incas and wise arnauta (learned
sage), has much of the compromising indio manso in him as he seeks peace
and dialogue with creoles, and thus represents the future spiritual mestizaje
of Peru. Some of the historiography reproduces similar bipolar images of
these two figures.
In his detailed study of the events of 1885, William Stein argues that the
image of that conflict as a race war was fabricated after the fact in the parti-
san pages of Lima's newspapers. There is little doubt that the race card was
51. Fidel Olivas Escudero, Geografia del Peri (Lima, 1887), 123-28.
played to deny the political intent of peasant actions and to disabuse Cace-
rista participants of responsibility "before history and the nation." But such
denials of peasant political intent are common among elites everywhere.
In this case, racist images of Indians in print were by no means limited to
ideologized fabrications, as Carranza's timely text illustrates. Notions of an
inferior, passive race, well disposed to backbreaking work, lacking in intel-
ligence, frozen in time by the Spanish conquest as sentimental vestiges of
Inca despotism, politically inept, and without ambition for a higher destiny
agreed with much pre- and postwar creole discourse on "the indigenous
race of Peru," which held that the "race" was incapable of rising to the test
of patriotism in the face of "wars of conquest" like that just suffered at the
hands of the Chileans.
Yet this rationalized, creole racism that depicted Indians as sullen and
immobile was itself haunted by a shadowy, historical fear of "race war." This
fear was larger than the Atusparia Uprising, and it frequently found its way
into print in nineteenth-century Peru. Philanthropic indigenistas associated
with the Sociedad Amiga de los Indios, for example, in the late 186os had
raised the rhetorical specter of "race war" in the pages of El Comnercio.
They had predicted an Indian siege of the coastal cities if relations between
"the races" did not improve, in the hope of scaring complacent creole elites
into supporting reforms that the Friends of the Indians believed would help
"redeem" the desgraciada raza indfgena.52
Indeed, nineteenth-century creole discourse on race war is traceable at
least as far back as the Tuipac Amaru II insurrection of 1780. The Atusparia
Uprising-particularly the initial reports from Iglesistas that appeared in
Lima's newspapers-could still recall the specter of that conflict. El Pa's,
which followed "the story with uneasy interest, trying to discover its real
character and tendencies," noted that
The El Pais editors, however, who were mostly of the Pierolista persua-
sion (that is, partisans of a demagogic indigenism), added that "none of that
is serious." But it was serious for the Iglesista newspaper, El Campeon, which
attacked the El Pats editorial on May 12. Atusparia, El Campeon agreed, was
certainly no Inca (that claim was no longer serious), but he was nevertheless
We have much of the Indian [in us]: that is why we are grateful and
faithful as a dog to those who love us and give us affection. The notes on
our race published yesterday in El Comercio, which we read with much
pleasure, deserve our gratitude to the author, and we publicly manifest
it here, discharging a sacred duty. It consoles the soul that while writers
here generally occupy themselves with Russia, Turkey, or the Sudan,
there is someone in Peru who is interested in the Peruvian Indians. We
must acknowledge this exceptional preference of the author of these
notes for the love it reveals for our race, and because today they brag
about killing us by the thousands at the same time that they go to great
lengths and expense to import a few hundred Chinese coolies because
of a lack of manpower. How could we not be grateful to our incognito
benefactor, when a few days ago one of those big capitalists, overhear-
ing someone read the military report from Huaraz [printed on the same
page], in which it was said that they had shot and killed two thousand
Indians, said: "all the better, there are too many Indians in Peru." With-
out the Indians, does this Sefior think that Peru could govern itself, or
defend itself from wars of conquest? If they kill us all, how many will
remain of the other castes? You count them.
Uti Mestizo55
54. Most influential was Sebastian Lorente's reading of the T6pac Amaru insurrection,
as in Historia del Peiri bajo los Borbones, 1700-1821 (Lima, 1871). Although it was not the
first such attempt, Clemients R. Markhai's Historia del Peri (Lima: Imprenta "La Equitativa,"
1895) rejected the "race war" reading, depicting Tuipac Amaru II as "Peru's last great patriot."
55. El Comiercio, May 30, 1885.
knowledge, to the level of all the rest of the free and independent citi-
zens. On the theme of taxes, General Caceres promised to Atusparia
that he would reduce them until they had gotten on their feet well
enough to make payments, so that the Indians would not consider them
a heavy burden.
The meeting of Atusparia and Ca6ceres, and particularly the pledges made
by the president-elect, seemed to promise a brighter future for Atusparia's
"race." But the postwar period in Ancash was marked by uneasy tension, not
reconciliation. Atusparia died an undocumented death in 1887; some say
he was poisoned, others that he contracted disease. The general's welcome
promise temporarily to reduce the poll tax "until Indians got back on their
feet" was still only a promise, and it reinained the most contentious issue
of the day. The pledged reduction materialized only after Atusparia's (and
Guillen's) successors, the alcaldes ordinarios Nicola's Granados and Apoli-
nario de Paz, firmly resisted repeated attempts by provincial officials, acting
under orders from Lima's Treasury Ministry (Hacienda), to proceed with
the collection of the poll tax. Indeed, it was only after Huaraz' alcaldes - fol-
lowing the well-worn, litigious political customs of the Andean peasantry-
sought literate legal assistance to compose several notable petitions to Presi-
dent Ca6ceres himself in 1887, and then stood firm until they got his reply,
that Ca6ceres actually kept his word, two years later (1889). Meanwhile, as
one of several tactics deployed to resist the poll tax, and aided partly by the
paranoid consciousness and rhetoric of local elites, the alcaldes raised the
bloody specter of 1885 over the heads of provincial officials.
Contrary to the historiographical claims of William Stein and Jorge Basa-
dre, after 1885 the poll tax was essentially uncollectable in Huaylas-Ancash
(as it was in much of the rest of central highland Peru).56 The Atusparia
rebels had burned the tax registers, successfully resisted drawing up new
ones, and otherwise avoided the collection of the tax, which Huaraz au-
thorities repeatedly attempted during the Cacerista decade (1885-95).57 The
reports of Ancash's prefects to the ministries in Lima make it clear that the
tax was uncollectable, that the fear of revolt was perennial from 1887 to
1895, and that the Indian alcaldes knew what they were up to. The words of
Prefect Jose Maria Rodriguez, written in 1893, merely reemphasize those of
earlier and subsequent prefects.
56. Jorge Basadre, Historia de la Repdiblica del Perui (Lima: Universitaria, 1968), 10:221.
57. See Thurner, From. Two Republics, 105.
58. Prefect Jose Maria Rodriguez to Treasury Ministry, Oct. 20, 1893, AGN, O.L. 609-852.
59. Expediente iniciado por los Alcaldes Ordinarios de los Distritos de Restauraci6n y
Independencia de Huaraz, June 1, 1887, AGN, O.L. 571-240; Thurner, "'Republicanos' and 'la
Cornuoiidad,"' 314-16.
In 1889 the commission drew up its proyecto de ley for the subdivision
and privatization of Peru's remaining community lands.6' Because of a lack
of funds, the commission never arrived in Huaraz, but in 1888 it requested
a detailed report from Ancash prefect Leonardo Cavero. Cavero attempted
to fulfill his duty but responded in August 1889,
The nature of Ca6ceres' word and the meaning of being treated as "Peruvian
citizens like everyone else" should now be more or less clear. The "pref-
erential place" Indians would occupy "in the considerations of rulers" was
marked by the sign of "race," and this sign would be turned against Indian
leaders in ways that echoed the colonialist discourses of the past. These
"considerations" nevertheless were also marked by the sign of "war"-the
other half of the recurring phrase "race war"t-which would be invoked
during the painful postwar period to underline the patriotic nature and
promising national potential of "the Peruvian soldier," who, some critics now
recognized, had fought heroically in the war against Chile.
Some creole intellectuals, elaborating on the patriotic discourse of shared
victimhood in the face of an aggressive Chilean imperialism, would now
identify with the Indian soldier. In many ways, their discourse was strikingly
similar to that developed by creoles after the wars of independence against
Spain. That discourse made the Indian soldier, particularly when disciplined
and acculturated by the corps of creole officers, a symbol of the victorious
nation; now he would be the symbol of the struggling but ever victimized
nation. It was no coincidence that the pro-Caceres creole cultural weekly La
Revista Social, which carried articles praising "the Peruvian Soldier" in the
war with Chile, also frequently published accounts of heroic exploits during
the independence wars. War was the one sphere in which Indians -despite
the dominant discourse on Peruvian Indian docility, exemplified by Car-
ranza's enduring 1885 essay or by Ricardo Palma's reflections on the war-
could be granted historical agency.63
It is perhaps not coincidental that Peru's most "national" institution, and
the one in which Indians were most likely to participate, albeit for the most
63. Ricardo Palma, Cartas a Pierola sobre la ocupacion chilena de Lima (Lima: Milla Ba-
tres, 1979), 20. See also Kristal, Andes Viewved, chap. 3; Manrique, Campesinado y naci6n,
105-10.
part involuntarily, was the army. It was the sphere, after those consigned to
the taxpayer and laborer, in which the Republic was most willing to cede
Indians a place in the nation.
Perhaps the fullest postwar statement on the Indian soldier was editor
Jose Antonio Felices' essay "El soldado peruano," which appeared in La
Revista Social on August i, 1885. The editorial was written to commemo-
rate Peru's Independence Day, July 28, in the spirit of a patriotism that in
other times and places might be expected to honor "the Unknown Soldier."64
In this case, that spirit, informed as it was by the fears and discourse of
race, could not yet be anonymous, for "Peruvian" here meant "indigenous."
Felices began by praising "the qualities of the indigenous soldier and the
great services he has offered in the cause of national independence and the
reign of its fundamental institutions," and by rejecting prevailing stereotypes
about the cowardly indio manso.
64. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalisml (London: Verso, 1991), chap. 2.
65. jos6 Antonio Felices, "El soldado peruano," La Revista Social, Aug. 1, 1885.
66. See esp. Zegarra's essay "Yo el rey: ensayo hist6rico," which appeared in Revista
Pertiana 1 (1879), 49-65, 118-23, 195-204.
67. Felices, "El soldado peruano."
the war which has just desolated our patria brings to memory many
episodes in which the valor inflamed by patriotism has left the name
of the Peruvian soldier inscribed in the fields of battle.... The resis-
tance that Chile always met in the [highland] interior proves without a
doubt that love of patria was a powerful sentiment prevailing among its
inhabitants.68
68. Ibid.
69. Carlos Lisson, Breves apuntes sobre la sociologia del Peni en i886 (Lima, 1887), 13. See
also Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre los departamentos del centro, bajo su aspecto
econ6mico y etnografico," Boletin de la Sociedad Geogrdfica de Lima 3:1-3 (June 30, 1893), 33;
Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of
Gutano, 1840-1880 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993).
70. See "Secci6n Indios," El Comercio, Sept. 15, 1868.
71. Manuel Gonzalez Prada, "Nuestros indios," in Obras (Lima: B. Gil, 1986), torno 2,
vol. 3, 195-210.
nize the valor of the Chupaquefios who, in the name of patria, had fought
to the death against the Chileans recognized the heroism of Atusparia's
legions, who had fought patriotically against Peruvian soldiers, somewhat
less easily. In the Ancash case, the discourse on race would remain intact
even as that discourse shifted toward liberal indigenismo, and it would be
turned against the alcaldes who had inherited Atusparia's vara. In the same
year that Gonzalez Prada wrote his unfinished notes on "Our Indians," the
liberal Ancash prefect Anselmo Huapaya, citing clerical meddling and "ca-
cique" despotism, declared the abolition of the Indian alcalde authorities
themselves.72
Huapaya's decree, which branded the alcaldes as caciques and, echoing
Gonzalez Prada, charged that they were "the worst exploiters of their race,"
essentially repeated Simon Bolivar's foundational republican decree of 1825,
delivered in Cuzco, which cited cacique despotism to justify the abolition of
the remaining colonial kurakas (hereditary Andean chiefs).73 But the repub-
lican discourse on cacique despotism also had Spanish colonial precedents.
Viceroy Toledo had used the argument of "tyranny" in the 1570S to rob
Inca nobles of the legal status of "natural lords," which would have justified
greater autonomy for Andeans; he had also used it to justify the quarter-
ing of the last "rebel" Inca, Tuipac Amaru I. Viceregal Inspector Areche,
whom Bolivar considered an exemplary colonial despot, had used the same
arguments as those of the Liberator to repress "rebel" kurakas in the 178os,
when he had Tu'pac Amaru II (Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui Thupa Amaro)
quartered for sedition. After that, Areche had suppressed the principle of
hereditary chieftainship (making exceptions for loyalist chiefs) and banned
the cultural symbols and language of what ethnohistorian John Rowe has
called "Inca nationalism."74
Both Areche and Bolivar deployed the discourse on cacique despotism
to abolish indirect rule through ethnic chiefs. Huapaya pronounced the
same intenit. But the prefect did not have to read colonial ordenanzas or
independence-era decrees to learn the right words; they were on the lips
of contemporary liberal reformers, positivists, and indigenistas (and would
remain so for decades to come). Such luminaries as Manuel Gonzalez Prada
and Clorinda Matto de Turner would cultivate the same discourse among the
lettered creole elite by simply substituting "clase" (kind) for "raza." Uppity
Indian leaders who managed to "rise above their kind" were, according to the
72. Prefect Anselmo Huapaya to Ministry of Government, Mar. 11, 1904, AGN, Ministerio
del Interior, leg. 95, mesa de partes no. 73.
73. For the decree, see Pedro Emnilio Dancuart, Anales de la Hacienda P4blica del Peru
(Lima: G. Stolte, 1902-26), 1:272.
74. John H. Rowe, "El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII," Revista Universitaria
(Cuzco) 107 (1954), 17-47.
75. See Kristal, Andes Viewed, chap. 3; Manuel Gonzalez Prada, "Discurso en el poli-
teama," in Pajinas libres (Paris: P. Dupont, 1894), 72-73; Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin
nido ([1889] Lima: Peisa, 1973), 9.
76. Prefect Huapaya to Ministry of Government, Mar. 1i, 1904, AGN, Ministerio del
Interior, leg. 95, mesa de partes no. 73.
77. Ibid.
from their plans to revolt. The prefect promised that the government would
attend to their petition. Then Manuel de la Vega was captured. De la Vega,
however, declared that the unrest was caused by Prefect Huapaya's decree
"that the chiefs of the Indians not be recognized in the character of authori-
ties, and that they be obliged not to carry the vara, which they consider to
be a sign of authority and representation."78
The explosive situation, put on hold by Huapaya's negotiations and the
ensuing national elections, was diffused months later when Huapaya's aboli-
tion was reversed by the new prefect, Eulogio Saldias. Saldias re-recognized
the offices of the alcaldes ordiniarios, he said, "for reasons of legality and
practical prudence." The Indians, he argued, "have beeni exercising these
offices since time immemorial; and apart from the fact that they are not
expressly forbidden by law, they tend to be just one more set of agents who
carry out the orders of the constituted authorities, thus consulting in the
harmony and subordination of the classes that they represent."79 Prefect
Saldias' practical stance, which sidestepped liberal dogma and the official
policy of the Ministry of Government in Lima (which later declared Sal-
dias' recognition void, holding that the Constitution prohibited the offices),
recognized the alcaldes as indispensable mediators of republican rule in
the Andean provinces. Saldias knew that without the varayoc authorities he
would not be able to govern the Indian communities.
Perhaps Caceres recognized the same reality when he decided to receive
Atusparia in his home on that June morning in i886. Atusparia, the largely
illiterate alcalde ordinario of humble peasant extraction, was no cacique; nor
was he the proclaimed "chief of the indigenous race," and rather less "the
representative of Manco Capac's race," which is to say, someone of noble
Inca descent.80 He was also no amcata (Quechua for scribe or learned elite;
figuratively, sage) as Reyna depicted him. Perhaps the indigenista desire to
represent Atusparia as an amnanta responded to the same creole nationalist
need to identify with the heroic Indian victim (as seen in the discourse about
the Peruvian soldier). Such identification could have reformist or even revo-
lutionary potential when cast in the public sphere; but it could also simply
serve the purposes of political posturing.
78. Ibid.
79. Prefect Saldias to Ministry of Government, Oct. 18, 1904, AGN, Ministerio del Interior,
leg. 95, mesa de partes no. 424.
8o. The "indigenous race" and "Manco Capac's race" were not usually synonymous in
nineteenth-century creole discourse. The former usually referred to Indian commoners, the
latter to Inca nobility; it was scientifically respectable to think of these classes as separate
"races" with distinct origins until circa 1895.
81. See Henri Favre, "Remnarques sur la lutte des classes pendant la Guerre du Pacifique,"
in Litteratutre et societe atu Perou dut XIXe siecle a nos jotrs: actes dii ier colloqtue (Grenoble:
Universit6 des Langues et Lettres de Grenoble, 1975), 55-81; Heraclio Bonilla, "The War of
the Pacific and the National and Colonial Problem in Peru," Past and Present 81 (1978), 92-118;
idem, "The Indian Peasantry and 'Peru' During the War with Chile," in Resistance, Rebel-
lion, and Consciotusness in the Anidean Peasant World, i8th to 20th Centtlries, ed. Steve J.
Stern (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 219-31; Manrique, Campesiniado y naci6n;
Mallon, "Nationalist and Anti-State Coalitions in the War of the Pacific: Junfin and Cajamarca,
1879-1902," in Stern, Resistance, 232-79.
82. For a direct examination, see Thurner, From Two Reptublics. For a summary of the
debate, see Stern, Resistance, 268-69.